IN BRIEF:

By Jove, this planet has many secrets!

Space

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Kenneth Chang, New York Times News Service,

Aug 15 2011, 16:43pm ist

updated: Aug 15 2011, 16:43pm ist

The last time we saw Jupiter up close, it was 16 years ago, when a probe from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft took a death plunge through the cloud tops and radioed back tantalising data that all but screamed, “To be continued...”

Now NASA is headed back to the big planet, looking for the clues to help answer pressing questions about the early days of the solar system. Because whatever was in Jupiter at the beginning – more than 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar system was formed – is still there, scientists say, hiding in a mysterious gas giant made up of dust and gas left over by the sun.

A spacecraft named Juno (after Jupiter’s wife in Roman mythology), on a five-year trip, will on July 4, 2016, as determined by planetary mechanics, pull into orbit around Jupiter and spend a year there, making scientific observations of gravity, magnetic fields and the wetness of the Jovian atmosphere. And then scientists may learn more of the secrets of Jupiter, which has twice as much mass as the rest of the planets in the solar system combined.

Learning what went into Jupiter“Jupiter holds the history of the solar system,” said Scott Bolton, director of the space science department at the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, and the principal investigator for the Juno mission. “If you want to understand that first step of how you went from forming a sun to forming the planets, you have to understand what went into Jupiter and how it was made.”

Although the wait will be long, scientists are excited enough about what they learned from Galileo – which was sent into Jupiter’s atmosphere in 2003, lest it crash into one of the moons and contaminate the environment with bacteria from earth – that they have great expectations for Juno. The biggest question is the water, because Galileo’s atmospheric probe found hardly any.

Astronomers have the big picture of the origins of the solar system. A cloud of hydrogen, much like interstellar hydrogen clouds seen elsewhere in the galaxy, collapsed to form the sun. As the cloud collapsed, it began to spin, like a figure skater pulling in the arms. That produced a flattened disk of leftovers orbiting the newborn sun, and those leftovers coalesced into the planets.

What exactly was in those leftovers is not known, however, which is why many of the spacecraft crisscrossing the solar system are looking for pristine remnants in comets, asteroids and – soon – Jupiter. While scientists can explain the hydrogen and the helium, it is the smidgen of heavier elements like carbon, oxygen, iron and nitrogen that are key elements for almost everything on earth.

“Life is in the balance here,” Bolton said, “and the things that make us up – that everything we’re looking at, breathing, touching – is all more or less unexplained.”

There are a few reasons that Jupiter holds particular interest for scientists. For one thing, it probably formed first, before the other planets. And its gravity is so strong that once anything got sucked into it during those formative years, it never got out again.

Even before the Galileo mission, astronomers had measurements indicating that Jupiter contained higher concentrations of heavier elements than the sun – a surprising finding, because both bodies were formed out of the same hydrogen cloud. But they came up with a plausible explanation: Among the solar system leftovers, they speculated, were water ice crystals.

After all, hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, oxygen is third and water molecules – two hydrogens and one oxygen – should be common. Ice traps heavier elements, and thus the icy bits that gathered into what became Jupiter could have skewed the concentrations higher.

The Galileo probe did measure enhanced concentrations, as expected, but not in the pattern predicted by the ice explanation. “In fact, in that one measurement, all the theories of how planets were made were proven wrong,” Bolton said, “and we were like, ‘Oh no, what now?’ Nature threw us a curveball.”

Even more perplexing was the paucity of water. In the post-mortem analysis, many scientists surmised that, by unlucky chance, the probe descended into a particularly hot and dry spot on Jupiter. But that was only an educated guess. The obvious next step would have been to send more probes beneath the cloud cover of Jupiter – especially ones that could survive to greater depths and temperatures – but that would have been prohibitively expensive.

Measuring the microwavesJuno is taking a different approach. The heat of Jupiter emits microwaves, and water absorbs microwaves. By simply measuring the strength of the microwaves radiating from Jupiter, scientists will be able to figure out how much water is in the clouds. “Once we get all those ingredients, we’ll see if we can figure out how to bake the cake, so to speak,” Bolton said.

To make the measurements, Juno will travel along a squashed elliptical orbit, swooping to within 3,100 miles of the cloud tops. Over the course of 33 orbits during the mission, Juno will get a global view of the interior. Unlike Galileo’s orbit, Juno’s will pass over Jupiter’s north and south poles, allowing the first close-up looks at the bright auroras there.

To survive the intense radiation around Jupiter, its instruments are housed inside a titanium vault. Eventually, the radiation will destroy the electronics and the craft will be sent crashing into the planet.

The gravity and magnetic field measurements could provide evidence of metallic hydrogen – at the crushing pressures inside Jupiter, hydrogen is expected turn into a liquid metal – and a core of heavier elements.

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